by John Bierce
“A list of your preferred healers for the mission is your top priority,” Yusef said. He reached into his desk and pulled out a folder. “I’ve already done a good bit of groundwork already, so you should be able to get at least a little work done tonight.”
Yusef sometimes remembered to write things down. Not always, but sometimes.
He handed her the folder and made to head back downstairs. He paused just before the door, however. “Oh, and allow me one little abuse of my position— no bringing your sisters along. One of my daughters in a plague zone is bad enough.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Rest Between
Nalda frowned as she rode towards Castle Morinth. The villages had been muted and quiet, with herds of cattle standing largely unattended. The few villagers wandering about seemed in shock, moving about like they had been broken and put back together haphazardly, with the tell-tale blackened fingers Benen had spoken about in his semaphore messages. Most of the healers from her party had split off already, to seek out and tend to the villagers, but she, along with two others, were heading straight to the castle.
In the end, the king had allowed them eight healers, including herself, as well as a military escort that Nalda suspected were there to watch the Moonsworn as much as they were there to protect them or reinforce Castle Morinth. They’d ridden hard, making the trip in two and a half weeks, instead of the usual three.
The castle gate was open, with only a couple of guards on duty. Both looked exhausted, but they lacked the signs of the disease they’d seen on the way in.
Nalda ignored the guards as her escort spoke to them, looking around her.
Castle Morinth was unusual, to say the least. It wasn’t truly built for defense, though the royal family considered it their final redoubt in case of invasion. The castle walls were lower than many other forts, but the keep and its grounds were both immense, built to house the population of the villages below during the harsh winters of the Krannenberg Mountains. Not to mention the cattle and enough supplies for the whole winter. Unlike most castles, however, there was little in the way of a permanent population, save for the garrison and their support staff.
The River Morinth, a tributary of the Winterbranch ran directly under the castle walls and into the castle grounds, through a massive grate. The openings weren’t just too small for a man to fit through, but too small for even a cat to fit. A normal castle would forego a vulnerability like a river running through it, relying on wells instead, but anyone attempting to breach the castle through the grate wouldn’t do so well— the River Morinth ran out of the Mist Maze, and for all the successes Lothain had had keeping the pass clear of monsters, the river upstream of the castle was filled with hellish creatures. The grate kept them upstream of the castle, but no one went near the river there if they could help it.
Through the castle gate, Nalda could see huge scaffolds throughout the castle grounds from the annual summer maintenance. The storms that rolled out of the Krannenbergs were legendary in their fierceness, and the Mist Maze did nothing to alleviate them. Each summer brought new damage to repair from the winter storms.
Though the Moonsworn had been forbidden access to the castle since its construction, there were plenty of accounts easily accessible to scholars in the libraries of Lothain. She’d read several commanders’ journals, a report summarizing its construction, and a decade’s worth of expense reports.
Like so many political actions, Nalda suspected the ban was more symbolic than anything. That sort of thing struck her as utter foolishness. Though, in fairness, she knew she would make a terrible politician— she lacked certain virtues politics demanded.
Notably tact, patience with others, or the ability to conceal her irritation for longer than a minute.
For all its size, though, the castle was still dwarfed by the steep mountains to either side.
The scaffolds were empty of workers, however, as were the castle grounds, from what little she could see.
“Where is Healer Benen?” Nalda said, interrupting the conversation between the guards. “I would speak to him, if he hasn’t died of your plague. We haven’t received messages from him at any semaphore towers along the way for at least a week now.”
The castle guard looked awkwardly at her. “The Wrack hit him, ma’am. He’s awake now, but in bad shape still. His fingers can’t work the semaphore chains anymore.”
“I’d guessed he died, so that’s an improvement above expectations. And the Wrack?” Nalda said. “Is that what you’re calling it? Because it leaves you all twisted up, like something left on a beach by the tide?”
“I’ve never been to the ocean, ma’am,” the perplexed guard said. “And I don’t know where the name came from. Old Man Emmet was the first one I heard calling it that.”
“Well, take me to him, then,” Nalda said, impatiently.
“To Old Man Emmet?” the guard asked.
“No,” Nalda snapped, “to Healer Benen! Why would I want to talk to Old Man Emmet?”
“He tells good stories,” the guard muttered, but he led her through the castle gate.
Benen was still resting in bed when Nalda arrived, and she immediately pulled on leather gloves and began prodding his limbs.
“Introductions are generally customary,” Benen whispered in a rasping tone.
“Healer Nalda,” she said, inspecting his blackened fingers. “Your fingers don’t look burnt, they look more… frostbitten.”
“I said as much in my messages, didn’t I?” Benen whispered, looking irritated.
Nalda shrugged. You really never could tell with Vowless healers. Some of them were almost good enough to be Moonsworn, but most were superstitious quacks, whose patients would likely be better off without them.
Nalda resumed poking and prodding at the middle-aged man, pausing every few minutes to take notes. Benen grunted on occasion, but seemed too exhausted to speak.
“You’re not as badly injured as some of the other survivors you described,” Nalda said.
Benen shrugged. “I’m not as young or as strong, am I? Too old and weak to break my own bones.”
Nalda grunted.
“How far has it spread?” Benen asked, closing his eyes.
“It hasn’t,” Nalda said.
Benen cracked his eyes back open at that.
“At least, it hadn’t a week ago,” Nalda said. “That was the last time we visited a semaphore receiving station. Whatever this… Wrack is, it might have burnt itself out, Goddesses willing.”
“Deserters should have reached other villages by now,” Benen said.
“They did,” Nalda said. “A couple of them were even struck down by the Wrack there, but no one from outside the pass has caught it yet.”
Benen grunted at that. Nalda continued taking notes, waiting for Benen to respond. When no answer was forthcoming, she glanced up to see Benen’s eyes closed and breath even.
Nalda blew air out of her nose in irritation and closed her journal. She might not have a particularly good bedside manner, but she was an otherwise excellent healer, and waking a patient just to settle one’s own curiosity was hardly good for their recovery.
Besides, there were plenty of other survivors for her to study.
Nalda glared at her notes. “I have,” she muttered to herself, “no idea what is going on.”
It had been a week since she’d arrived, and the Wrack had proven utterly opaque.
Two-thirds of the residents of Castle Morinth had fallen ill with the disease. One in four of them had died. The residents were, however, largely soldiers or servants in the prime of their life.
In the villages, on the other hand, less than half of the residents had fallen ill, but one in two had died. Much of this, however, came from the fact that the villages had many more children and elderly than Castle Morinth. Children stricken by the Wrack hardly ever died from it, and indeed, they suffered much less severely. The elderly, however, died in far greater numbers— almost all from the
ir hearts giving out.
Heart failure wasn’t the only cause of death, by any means. A few had died in the first moments of the convulsive attacks, frothing at the mouth. One blacksmith, in the throes of particularly violent convulsions, had managed to throw herself off her bed and break her own neck. The most common cause of death, outside of heart failure, was uncontrolled clenching of the throat muscles, leading to suffocation.
For how silly Nalda found Eidol superstitions, their funeral monoliths, engraved with the names of the dead, often made the Moonsworn’s jobs much easier. Tracking the deaths caused by illnesses was an exercise in frustration and futility in most places. Your average Vowless hardly bothered to differentiate between dying of illness or dying of accident, let alone different types of illness. The Eidol, however, recorded causes of death quite compulsively in their death archives.
At least, if she could trust their records. Heart failure was easy enough for even an incompetent seer with a quartz eye to identify, but Benen was the only seer worth the name at the castle or the villages, and he’d attended relatively few of the ill. The Wrack had laid low over a thousand people, killing hundreds of them over the course of just two weeks.
To further complicate the numbers, they had woefully incomplete records of the fates of the deserters, or those who had fled the villages.
Many of the survivors complained of lethargy, memory loss, reduced color vision, and weakness in the limbs. Their blackened fingers and toes ranged from moderate stiffness to complete loss of mobility, with no signs of improvement. Dark urine was common, and the later stages of the Wrack involved days to weeks of diarrhea or loose stool. Many of their spouses complained of lack of… marital interest.
Nalda had never precisely understood most people’s obsession with that sort of thing, but she at least knew not to underestimate said obsession, even if she’d never felt it herself.
The one village midwife that hadn’t been struck down by the plague had proven herself invaluable. Not because she was particularly capable, intelligent, or even likable. No, in fact she was a gossipy, nosy, judgemental woman, whom Nalda would almost consider paying to stay away from her. Though, in fairness, Nalda would pay most people to stay away from her.
The midwife was so useful simply because she was so gossipy— she knew everything about almost everyone in the villages. Rather than painstakingly figuring out what each of the dead had done for a living, where they had lived, and who they’d had contact with, Nalda had been able to simply ask the midwife most of it.
Unfortunately, it meant she’d had to sort through endless piles of useless gossip as well.
Since she’d gotten to the castle, however, there had only been three cases of the Wrack in the villages. All three had died of heart failure, two of said deaths she’d been able to attend. Not a single case had been reported outside the pass, save for among deserters and refugees— at least, not according to the last messenger that had arrived, three days ago. If there had been an incoming semaphore as well, she could have had much more up to date information, but the nearest was two days’ swift ride away. Few messengers were willing to risk plague to deliver messages to her, either.
Still, the next messenger should be arriving later today, with any luck.
The cases she’d attended had been… strange. She had a somewhat greater understanding of Benen’s confused reports, now— the ripples the disease cast in the Goddess Sea were unlike those of any disease she’d ever seen before, and she fully understood how Benen had mistaken it for poisoning, at first. The ripples were larger and choppier than even those of horsepox or bride’s blush.
On top of that, the sort of crude damage the Wrack did to the body far more closely resembled poison than contagion. Fevers rarely grew particularly hot, compared to most contagions. In most illnesses, delirium and convulsions went hand in hand with extremely high fevers, but not with the Wrack. Sailor’s pox— the disease that Lothaini knew as Galicantan Pox, Galicantans knew as Sunsworn Pox, and Sunsworn knew as… well, every nation seemed to call it after someone they disliked— was one of the few exceptions, but its delirium happened years and years after infection, and was presaged by all sorts of sores and rashes. It also, well… definitely did not reduce marital interest in its victims.
The most baffling part was the contagion’s disappearance. By now Nalda would have expected it to be halfway to Lothain, but it didn’t seem to have spread at all. The Wrack’s victims didn’t cough or sneeze more than a healthy person. More victims than not had diarrhea, though almost never until after the delirium had ended. She wasn’t even sure that was related to the Wrack, since others had reported watery stool as well.
Castle Morinth and its dependent villages were only a couple centuries old, constructed long after the Moonsworn had convinced the Teringian nations to follow their rules regarding building next to water. They weren’t always the best at keeping to them, but it should have prevented waterborne illness from spreading this badly.
She could hear shouting outside the window of her temporary office, out in the castle courtyard, but she ignored it, focusing on her notes.
Senna, one of the other Moonsworn healers that had accompanied her, had suggested that the Wrack had a far longer dormancy period after spreading than most contagions, but Nalda doubted that, largely thanks to the cattle around here. She’d had to find out far more than she wanted to about cattle herding from the gossipy midwife to figure out the cattle herder’s schedules. The hairy, long-horned mountain cattle had to be fattened up after a long winter. That meant that with the late springs in the mountains, they weren’t herded down to the plains until the beginning of summer at the earliest, and usually later than that. The cattle herders in the villages had just started their cattle drives a couple days before Arnulf’s death. By now, the cattle should have all been sold to lowland butchers and cattle merchants, with the herdsmen on their way back.
If, at least, the fear of the Wrack didn’t keep them away.
Though… sailor’s pox did go dormant for months, years, or even decades after the initial symptoms. The two diseases weren’t much alike beyond the delirium, but perhaps some monster from the Mist had spread it among the town or village some time ago, and it only now had spread? Though it couldn’t have been years ago, or soldiers that had been transferred away from their posts at Castle Morinth would have come down with it as well.
That was easy enough to check— she’d just need to know when the last troop transfer had been.
Though, on second thought, she rather imagined that the Lothaini would be suspicious of a Moonsworn asking about troop movements. Still, she’d inquire with Benen when she had a chance— he’d been nothing if not helpful, at least when he could stay awake.
There was just so much Nalda didn’t know. Most importantly, she hadn’t observed any victims in the post-delirium fevered stage. Benen had reported that the ripples— turbulence, the Vowless called them— had changed significantly after the delirium ended, but Nalda hadn’t been able to see it for herself, and Benen hadn’t been able to draw them. Being able to accurately draw the Sea was a skill only few could master— its subtle shadings and shifts lent themselves poorly to paper.
The door to her office burst open.
“Nalda!” Senna shouted, panting and out of breath.
Nalda gave the older healer an irritated look. She was unquestionably good as a healer and was considered something of an expert in unusual illnesses, but she was as excitable as a much younger woman and tended to burst in on her with some new idea at least twice a day.
“The courier’s here!” Senna said. She took a deep breath. “It’s the Wrack. It’s spread.”
Nalda was out of her seat and on her way down the courtyard before Senna could even blink.
CHAPTER FIVE
Monsters in Seibarrow
Annica had shuttered the windows of her room andd latched them. She’d taken the winter tapestries out from the loft, struggling to carry the thick
cloth on her own, and had stretched and hung them over the windows. She’d torn up bits of cloth and shoved them into her ears. She’d wanted to melt wax into them, but Mama had stopped her— the only time either of her parents had taken notice of her at all in days. She’d bundled herself in as many blankets as she could, and rolled herself under the wooden frame of her bed. She’d pressed her ears between two pillows.
She could still hear the screaming.
Even as hot and stifling as it grew, even drenched with sweat, she kept herself wrapped up, trying to keep out the screams.
The servants had stopped coming days ago, soon after the screaming started. Mama said they were just afraid, but Annica knew she was lying.
The monsters had gotten them. Just like they were going to get Mama and Papa, and just like they were going to get her.
Dierdre paced across the house, counting her steps. Five across the wide entry hall. Ten through the parlor. Another four through the narrow, crowded back hall, maneuvering past the garderobe and the stairwell leading up to her and her husband’s bedroom and their daughter Annica’s bedroom. Five steps more if she entered her husband’s office at the end of the back hall, or seven if she entered the kitchen, with its door leading to the alley behind.
It wasn’t a big house, even compared to their old one, but they weren’t sharing it with ten other family members over the family tailor’s shop. It was finely built, as well, hardly letting in a draft during the winter, when all the winter tapestries were tacked up over the windows. It got a little warm in the summer, even with the windows open, but what house didn’t?
Six back across the kitchen this time. She took a deep breath, shortening her stride again.
Four across the back hall.
Silas, the crotchety old miser who lived in the house sharing their north wall, had started screaming yesterday afternoon. It had broken something in Annica. The six year old had already been panicked and terrified, and when Silas started screaming, she’d hidden away in her room. Dierdre knew she should be with her daughter, but she couldn’t hold still, couldn’t stop moving.
